Field & Stream | May 2014

T.R. on Duck Hunting

For a long while I believed I’d read everything T.R. wrote on hunting—or was written about T.R. and hunting—when in Douglas Brinkley’s excellent biography, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, I came across mention of an early essay on waterfowling. Sou’ Sou’ Southerly wasn’t published in T.R.’s lifetime. It finally saw the light of day in 1988 in Gray’s Sporting Journal after yachting historian John Rousmaniere unearthed it from the Library of Congress. (Rousmaniere discovered it after following a footnote in Edmond Morris’ masterpiece The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.) I tracked it down after reading Brinkley, eventually finding a lone bookseller in New Mexico that had a copy of that old Gray’s for $20, shipping included. Since then, I’ve unearthed and transcribed T.R.’s original manuscript. It is now available online for the first time in this electronic edition.